Gregory Maguire quotes:

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  • My first job was scooping ice cream at Friendly's in Albany, New York. I hated the work, most of my colleagues, and the uniform, and I more or less lost my taste for ice cream permanently.

  • The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

  • In a sense, 'Out of Oz' is an examination of how individuals keep going, keep reinventing themselves and their lives, even after life-altering complications have afflicted them.

  • While I pride myself on trying to be creative in all areas of my life, I have occasionally gone overboard, like the time I decided to bring to a party a salad that I constructed, on a huge rattan platter, to look like a miniature scale model of the Gardens of Babylon.

  • The cave of Ozma has been discovered, and she is to come back and rule our Oz, and the idiotic Scarecrow can go stuff himself. Hah!Good one: a Scarecrow stuffing himself."

  • Elphaba looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life.

  • Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

  • I was just about to begin writing 'Mirror Mirror', within about a week of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring about fiction-making for a number of months.

  • I had written childrens books for 14 years before I published Wicked. And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.

  • I write because I admire the act of rationalization, of seeking clarity in one's understanding of the complexities of life, and I'm bad at it. I'm slow. Writing, which is an arduous and slow process, proceeds at the same rate as my sloth-like mind.

  • The story of Mirror Mirror is in many ways a story about evolution. Its about the evolution of a child into an adult. Its about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. Its about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason.

  • His avenging angel had come to call him home. A suicide was waiting for him back in his own world, and by now he ought to have learned enough to get through it successfully.

  • The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.

  • Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met

  • Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.

  • Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn't rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled,...it is Art.

  • Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.

  • The story of 'Mirror Mirror' is in many ways a story about evolution. It's about the evolution of a child into an adult. It's about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. It's about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason.

  • Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history

  • Always the bridesmaid , never the bride." Always the godfather, never the god".

  • Little critters fried like fritters come out crunchy and divine.

  • I learned to fly on a broom," he said, rolling up his sleeves. "I can learn to milk a goat, I bet." Though flying on a broom proved to be the easier task, he found.

  • No one controls your destiny. Even at the very worst - there is always choice.

  • When I began 'Wicked', I really thought of it entirely as a one-off, as the English say. There was no intention that there should ever be a follow up, because the subtitle was 'The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West'. She was dead and gone, as the book says, at the end.

  • Her sister's shoes. They sparkeled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkeled like yellow diamonds, and embers of blood and thorny stars.

  • A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him -so why bother?- but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible.

  • We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls

  • The colossal might of wickedness, he thought: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime."

  • Isn't that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger--"

  • Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling porcupine," she croonedLittle critters fried like fritters come out crunchy and divine."

  • Behold the male beast roaring in the jungle for his mate," said Elphaba. "See how the female beast giggles behind a shrub while she organizes her face to say, Pardon dear, did you say something?

  • You're fun to look at," decided Galinda. Boq's face fell. "Fun?" he said. I'd give a lot to achieve fun," Elphaba said. "The best I usually hope for is stirring, and when people say that they're usually referring to digestion-

  • I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.

  • I never use the words HUMANIST or HUMANITARIAN, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.

  • ...but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn't hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin.

  • I'm not a writer because I want to make money. I'm a writer because I'm a very slow thinker, but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with any kind of finesse is by telling stories.

  • She watched the sun bleed water out of the icicle. Warm and cold working together to make an icicle. Warm and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.

  • It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?

  • In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.

  • And girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the side stepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down, ever, ever.

  • No one survives in times of war unless they make war their home. How did I get so old and wise, but for welcoming war into my house and making friends with him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on. Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.

  • The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance; some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.

  • Those times are over and gone, and good riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we're the tick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we're in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.

  • I actually prefer female voices to listen to, mostly, but among the male singers whose voices I like are Jeff Buckley, Art Garfunkel, that sort of voice. Contemporary crooners rather than rockers.

  • No one is exempt from grief

  • Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

  • Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.

  • But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn't done before.

  • Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It's so much like home, and then it holds out on you.

  • Come what may and hell to pay.

  • Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on - or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense

  • Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

  • Oh, mercy, there is nothing monstrously ugly about you. Ruth may be unpleasing, but you are merely plain. If anything, it's my beauty that's monstrous, for it sweeps away any other aspect of my character.

  • Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.

  • Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

  • It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.

  • Your childhood," said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.

  • History plays for keeps; individuals play for time.

  • Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

  • This is what fun is like," said Rain, almost to herself.

  • Isn't that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger--

  • Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.

  • Of course. You get everything from books.

  • Children talk themselves out of their convictions as they grow up and become distracted by their huge selfish selves. All the literature is consistent on this point. Children begin to think they've imagined us.

  • Galinda didn't often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversations was flow.

  • He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.

  • The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace.

  • To grow a melody?" "You can't grow a melody on purpose, she said, and slyly added, you have to plant an accidental.

  • There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.

  • You leave home, I have learned, counting the trip day by day. If you ever get to return, you count the trip miracle by miracle.

  • I hate to be obvious," added the Scarecrow, "but you'd have saved yourself a heap of trouble if you weren't too cheap to invest in a leash, Dorothy.

  • I was just about to begin writing Mirror Mirror, within about a week of it, when September 11, 2001 happened. I found myself incapable of caring about fiction-making for a number of months.

  • I had written children's books for 14 years before I published 'Wicked.' And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.

  • Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing. If one could drown in the grass...it might be the best way to die.

  • Before you save anyone else, you have to save yourself. otherwise, you'rejust a bundle of tics, a stringed puppet manipulated by the chance and the insensible wind.

  • I know you don't want to hear this but someone has to say it! You are out of control! I mean they're just shoes... let it go!

  • The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.

  • People always did like to talk, didn't they? That's why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

  • My tastes in music tend to favor anything my kids don't like, out of natural antipathy amplified by a sort of malicious glee.

  • I never write a book unless I can't help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.

  • Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless you're really depressed or something, the person in the mirror generally looks a little more competent, a little more curious, a little more intelligent than you actually feel yourself to be? They often look more interesting and more soulful.

  • I like to think I'm a pretty good-natured guy and pretty civil and probably not ever truly guilty in any serious way of any legal infractions.

  • ...I dabble in causes and effects.

  • ...looking at him makes her feel like laughing all over - as if she could laugh not just with her mouth but with her eyes, her heart, her very limbs.

  • ...No opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals.

  • ...perhaps charity is the kind of beauty that we comprehend the best because we miss it the most.

  • ...the reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.

  • ...What is the use of beauty? i have lived my life surrounded by painters, and still I do not know the answer. But i suspect, some days, that beauty helps protect the spirit of mankind, swaddle it and succor it, so that we might survive. Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes or lives less miserable so that we might be more kind-well, then, lets have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our stories.

  • [Puggles] "What population signs on willingly for slavery?" "You mean other than wives?" [Glinda]

  • A capacity for inferiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation by squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hallowness. The syndrom especially plaques anyone who lives behind a mask. An elephant in her disquise as a human princess, a scarecrow with painted features, a glittering tiara under which to glow and glide in anonymous glamour. A witch's hat, a wizards stole, a scholars gown, a soldiers dress sartorials. A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I nkow what I know.

  • A man is called a traitor, or liberator. A rich man is a theif or philanthropist. Is one a crusader or ruthless invader? It's all in which label is able to persist.

  • All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn't we hear a voice of prophecy,

  • And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.

  • And it's a cold place the world, especially when warmed by arsen.

  • And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no "after", in the "ever after" of a Witch there is no "happily"; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is-alas, or perhaps thank mercy-no telling. She was dead, dead, and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.

  • And there the wicked witch stayed for a long long time.' Did she ever come out?' Not yet.

  • Approval is overrated...Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without.

  • Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!

  • Are you the dart?" he said. "Are you the knife? The fuse?" She said (though he wasn't convinced): "My deane, my poppet, I am too green to walk into a public place and do something bad...

  • As long as people are going to call you lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

  • at least i'm talkng to myself. instead of giving myself the cold shoulder

  • Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being.

  • Begging your pardon, sir....One population can't make peace with another by force.

  • Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.

  • But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

  • But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him "Yero, my hero," and that melted his heart.

  • Children are wickeder than adults, they have no sense of restraint.

  • Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?

  • Don't wish,"said Rain, "don't start. Wishing only...

  • Doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction.

  • Elena had always felt like the center of her own world - who doesn't? The world arranged itself around her like petals around the stem of a flower. This way the meadows, that way the woodland. Over here, the baryn's estate, out there, the hills that hug the known world close and imply a world at beyond. She could never come up with the edge of a world, because it always kept going on beyond. She moved the center of the world as she walked. The world was balanced on her head.

  • Even God used silence as a strategy.

  • Everyone dies. It's a question of where and how, that's all.

  • Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.

  • Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don't forget we loved it when we were alive.

  • Forgive us our trespasses," says Margarethe, "and get out of our way.

  • From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.

  • Have you ever noticed when you look in a mirror, unless youre really depressed or something, the person in the mirror generally looks a little more competent, a little more curious, a little more intelligent than you actually feel yourself to be? They often look more interesting and more soulful.

  • He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

  • He knew about being alone. The weather was always cold there.

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